Guild Wars 2

I play alot of guild wars 2 wvw and am looking for a computer to run it at a a GOOD rate. I have around 1,500 dollars to spend on a premade system. I am not comfortable building my own at all and wished to seek the advice of the community which might be more knowledgable. I get 20% off dell products lol.

Any advice would be welcomed on any products.

With that amount of money I’d say the best option would be to choose the parts to your computer and and have it built for you, most of the computer stores should do that. Problem with prebuilt computers are they don’t list all the specs and that usually means they’re not very good quality. Usually the manufacturers of PSU and motherboard are left unmentioned and you don’t want those to fail.

If that option is still not ok, I’d say look into something like these.

Bottom line, you want a PC with an overclockable Intel CPU, a good cooling solution and overclock the jesus out of it as this is the part that will be bottlenecking you no matter what.
For a GPU, Nvidia’s GTX 650 Ti or above or any of the GTX 700-series, or AMD’s HD 7790 or R7 260X or above.
The rest is pretty optional, see how big hard drive you’re gonna need, 8 gigs of RAM should be plenty and PSU and Motherboard from reputable brands and you’re good to go.

So I could I bring a electronics store the details you listed and have a workable system?

Yes, there are hardware stores that sell components and build them for you and there are also just services that don’t sell the parts but just do the assembly. If you wanna go this route I can put up a more concrete list so it’s easier. First I just need to know is GW2 the only game you play and/or is there some other demanding tasks your PC needs to run?

Gw2 is the only game. and thank you a ton.

Alright then. Since it’s your computer you need to make some decisions.

i5 4670k or i7 4770K? i7 basically just means more threads from which GW2 doesn’t really benefit. New applications will though and if GW2 gets optimized then it might too, but I wouldn’t count on it. So is ~2 fps worth the extra $80?

GW2 doesn’t demand much from the GPU, last generation units max the grapics easily at1080p. Now if you ever wanna go 1440p or 4K you need a lot more power, so do you want to leave some headroom?

How large storage do you need?
Do you care for the aesthetics of the internals? Or is it all about performance?

I am near computer illeterate sadly. I would say leave some headroom. Storage mostly enough for gw2 and skype,ts etc. smaller programs. Aesthetics are nice.

Alright. Since ~900 bucks already gives you a pretty nice machine for GW2 having that extra 600 really gives some options to tweak around. I’ve chosen this kind of system:

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/3occ5

Good motherboard and a CPU paired with very powerful cooling solution gives you tons of headroom to overclock (this is what you really need in WvW), a GPU that’s capable of running the game even in 1440p if you ever decide to go there (you need a 1440p monitor for this though, but there’s the headroom we spoke of), 1 TB mass storage should be plenty even if you decide to save some movies or TV shows etc. and the icing of the cake is the SSD drive for lightning fast loading times in game (seriously, if you haven’t had this before you don’t know what you’ve missed)

I’ve left the chassis out so you can check which one you find appealing, also there’s no DVD drive since I’m not sure if you’re gonna need it, you can get one for 20 bucks if you do.

I have to point out here that even with this system which will bring you the best performance you can get, you will see fps drop in WvW from time to time. There’s just not a single CPU out there that’s strong enough for this game. I have i5 4670K overclocked from 3.4 GHz to 4.6 GHz, that’s around the average for these chips, and I still see sub-20’s in fps when the map is absolutely crowded. that 4770K will bring maybe a few more frames but still it wont be butter smooth.

Once again there is no PC on the market that can play a game that is not optimized and sustain good frames. You should never have to over clock a CPU to make a game run good. Do not build a computer for this game thinking its going to run good, this game is not optimized. Do not base your computers performance around this game go with numbers on tech forums for CPU performance and GPU performance. What else do you use your computer for, streaming, video editing ask yourself these question before you build.

Torque.2948:

Once again there is no PC on the market that can play a game that is not optimized and sustain good frames. You should never have to over clock a CPU to make a game run good. Do not build a computer for this game thinking its going to run good, this game is not optimized. Do not base your computers performance around this game go with numbers on tech forums for CPU performance and GPU performance. What else do you use your computer for, streaming, video editing ask yourself these question before you build.

This is not entirely true.

If you tweak your settings, and OC your i5/i7 to 4.0ghz, you can do pretty well. I sit between 28-30FPS in 60man zergs now and 90-130+FPS in the rest of the game.

You have to reduce the CPU bound settings in the game to do that though.

sirsquishy.8531:

Torque.2948:

Once again there is no PC on the market that can play a game that is not optimized and sustain good frames. You should never have to over clock a CPU to make a game run good. Do not build a computer for this game thinking its going to run good, this game is not optimized. Do not base your computers performance around this game go with numbers on tech forums for CPU performance and GPU performance. What else do you use your computer for, streaming, video editing ask yourself these question before you build.

This is not entirely true.

If you tweak your settings, and OC your i5/i7 to 4.0ghz, you can do pretty well. I sit between 28-30FPS in 60man zergs now and 90-130+FPS in the rest of the game.

You have to reduce the CPU bound settings in the game to do that though.

But we all know 60 man zerg is not that huge really. Better not get the man’s hopes up too high. It’s good to have some actual statistics to this thread too so he knows what’s happening though.

locx.6412:

sirsquishy.8531:

Torque.2948:

Once again there is no PC on the market that can play a game that is not optimized and sustain good frames. You should never have to over clock a CPU to make a game run good. Do not build a computer for this game thinking its going to run good, this game is not optimized. Do not base your computers performance around this game go with numbers on tech forums for CPU performance and GPU performance. What else do you use your computer for, streaming, video editing ask yourself these question before you build.

This is not entirely true.

If you tweak your settings, and OC your i5/i7 to 4.0ghz, you can do pretty well. I sit between 28-30FPS in 60man zergs now and 90-130+FPS in the rest of the game.

You have to reduce the CPU bound settings in the game to do that though.

But we all know 60 man zerg is not that huge really. Better not get the man’s hopes up too high. It’s good to have some actual statistics to this thread too so he knows what’s happening though.

Being in a T4 server, I would say that a 60man zerg is ‘average’. and with your character limit set to low you dont really see more then 30~ player bodies on the screen anyway.

Yeah of course tier and population comes into play. I used to play on a server that was in T6-8 but sometimes the fights were pretty big, especially during the peak hours and they would drop my fps sub-20. Also I don’t think seeing only 30 by culling is the same for performance than there only being 30 people. Of course a lot better than having those 60 though.

locx.6412:

Yeah of course tier and population comes into play. I used to play on a server that was in T6-8 but sometimes the fights were pretty big, especially during the peak hours and they would drop my fps sub-20. Also I don’t think seeing only 30 by culling is the same for performance than there only being 30 people. Of course a lot better than having those 60 though.

No, culling is not even close to the same performance as there being actual numbers on the screen. But, it helps A lot.

Indeed, in the last times I T1 zerg fought I noticed a huge boost from culling off>culling on maximum, something like 6-9 FPS to ~16-20 FPS iirc. With everything but render sampling off/on as low as possible, of course.

So there is no set computer that will run this well? I can pick my pieces as best I can with the info offered by locx

Yeah, “well” is kind of subjective but the truth is you can’t hold 30 fps in 100+ man fights, not even in a little smaller ones. At least you know that no one else is getting any better performance than you are.